Now, try and control yourselves Linux fanboys. I'm not an M$ fanboy at all, but I am going to present to you a clear analysis of my experience with Linux to try and explain why I prefer Windows to Linux.
I put Mandrake Linux on my P133, 32MB RAM, 2MB video card system, because I have a friend who continuously expounds about the performance advantage of Linux, and how you could get it to run on a toaster. I used both the KDE and Gnome environments, and I understand the performance would have been far better in a pure CLI, but that's not fair because there's no rendering to be done and Windows isn't pure CLI. Not to mention there was no option anywhere to exit the GUI to a shell.
Here's some nice little comparisons between Win98 and Linux I did on that computer:
BOOT:
Linux: ~10 minutes
Windows98: ~2 minutes
MOVING AN ICON FROM ONE SIDE OF THE DESKTOP TO ANOTHER:
Linux(KDE): ~1 minute
Windows98: ~1 second
VIEWING CONTENTS OF DRIVE C:
Linux(KDE and Gnome's average): ~1 minute, not counting the minute it took to start up the graphical windows explorer clone
Windows98: ~15 seconds
PLAYING AN MP3:
Linux: I don't know. Despite numerous web sites that claimed my Ensoniq card was fully compatible with Mandrake, it never recognized my sound card.
Windows98: Works fine, system performance is degraded.
INSTALLING HARDWARE:
Linux: PnP Device 12341324: please email this information to [email protected] so developers can make a driver for this device.
Windows: Windows has detected new hardware: Ensoniq Vivo90 Would you like to install it now?
Stability:
Linux: Over the 5 hours I ran it, Linux froze and required system shutdown twice, and programs hung almost every other time I ran them.
Windows98: Takes mine a whole day to crash, using the same rigorous regimen of one program at a time I used in Linux.
So, as you can see, I had a bad experience with Linux. I'm sure you are going to jump all over me and tell me it's not fair to judge Linux on such a pathetic computer. My response is Windows worked fine on it, and I only met minimum system requirements. I don't know what the system requirements for Linux are, but I do know the KDE and Gnome shells waste too much processing power on trying to look like Mac OS X (a problem WinXP has as well). My problem is that I feel an OS should have very minimal system requirements. Regardless of what is the industry standard computer, I feel an OS should be compatible with the average computer. I'm not saying it should run on a 486, but I think it's ridiculous that Win95 only required a Pentium 90 and 32 recommended MB of RAM, and today WinXP requires far more than that. Keep it simple, programmers.
I'd have WindowsXP in the comparison, but Win98 was the last Windows that would run well on that computer because WinME had the super sucky memory management and WinXP is trying to look like OS X. I have never seen XP crash so far. It has hung, but never for more than 1 minute, it actually seems to fix itself.